Racial Anti-Semitism
The anti-Semitic theology of Christian Identity has been woven of many strands. The most commonplace consist of various racial explanations of Jewish origins, all designed to cast doubt on Jewish connections to the biblical Israel and to give to Jews a variety of unsavory characteristics. Some of these ideas were nurtured within British-Israelism itself, but most were the common property of anti-Semites of a variety of persuasions, both religious and secular.
While British-Israelism never manifested the systematic, sustained, and intense anti-Semitism currently found on the Identity right, it did nurture a number of covertly, and occasionally overtly, anti-Semitic themes. These were to provide the basis for future elaboration by Identity writers. By its nature, British-Israelism radically reduced the religious claims that they believed could legitimately be made by Jews, since Anglo-Saxons were the true Israel. At best, Jews would have to content themselves with the secondary affiliation of Judah, part of All-Israel to be sure, but with only a minor role to play in God’s plan. Some British-Israel writers used this concept of “religious disenfranchisement” to further diminish the already attenuated tie between Jews and All-Israel. They did so by questioning the one form of religious identification that British-Israel permitted to Jews, the link with the tribe of Judah. By introducing concepts of “interracial” marriage, these writers called into question even the diminished connection that Hine and others had acknowledged.
These aspersions cast upon Jewish origins took two major forms. One linked Jews with non-Israelite peoples of the ancient world, whose vices they had allegedly absorbed through intermarriage. The most common version of this theory was the charge that Jews had been absorbed into the Edomites, the putative descendants of Esau. This found much subsequent favor with Identity writers, although they, along with some earlier authors, interchangeably employed such labels as Edomite, Canaanite, Hittite, and Amorite—regarded as equally defiling. The charge of an Edomite connection became notably stronger in British-Israelism during the mid- and late 1940s as a result of rising Zionist demands for an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Since the creation of such a state necessarily required Great Britain to give up its mandate to govern Palestine, Zionism was taken by British-Israelites to be an affront to God’s plan, which required Israel (i.e., Britain) to control the Holy Land.
The second type of attack upon Jewish antecedents took a more radical form, arguing that in fact those who called themselves Jews were members of two different “races,” one authentically linked by Judean ancestry to All-Israel, but the other stemming from a wholly unrelated biological source. This had the effect of dividing the Jewish people into “good Jews,” who could rightfully claim a Judean pedigree, and “bad Jews,” who were impostors masquerading as Judeans. The most common form this theory took was the belief that the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe were in fact descendants of the Khazar people who had lived in the area of the Black Sea and had converted (to what extent is in fact unknown) to Judaism. While the Khazar hypothesis was not originated by British-Israelites, some found it attractive, and it subsequently became a virtual article of faith not only in Identity but upon the extreme right generally. As chapter 8 will demonstrate, the process of religious disenfranchisement in general, and the claim that at least some Jews have a distinct racial origin, was to contribute to Identity’s most novel and sinister doctrine, the belief that Jews are the offspring of Satan.
In fact, much early British-Israelism was philo-Semitic. While insisting upon the need for Jews to eventually convert to Christianity, early British-Israel writers emphasized their ties to Jews and sought to exercise a protective and paternalistic role toward them. Thus, M. M. Eshelman, in one of the first British-Israel books published in America, wrote:
The Jews and the Israelites are upon amicable terms. For ages the Jews have been hated, hunted, persecuted, and cast out in many countries. In Russia they are abhorred, shut out, and debarred from nearly every profit- able employment. Among the English they find sympathy, friends, kindness and benevolence. Why are they hated in one country and loved in another? God said they would be persecuted and scattered among the heathen; He also said they should be joined to Ephraim [England] in the latter days. The latter days are at hand, and the way is preparing in the East [Palestine] for a glorious union.
Eshelman’s point of view was not atypical and followed the line laid down by Edward Hine. Since the final millennial consummation required the unification of All-Israel in Palestine, Jews had to be protected and aided in their aspiration for return so that they could join representatives of the other tribes.1
Despite this philo-Semitic strain, British-Israelism operated in an environment rife with anti-Semitism. The movement’s heyday at the turn of the century was a time when racial theorizing was rampant in Western intellectual circles, and racial inequality was accepted as both socially necessary and scientifically established. Racialism extended to perceptions of Jews, since for most late nineteenth-century writers, lines between “race,” “ethnicity,” and “nationality” ranged from vague to nonexistent. Beyond the intellectual acceptability racial theories had achieved, social and political circumstances in America guaranteed a sympathetic hearing for them, since they appeared to strengthen and make respectable the hostility to mass immigration articulated by American nativists. If the masses arriving from Europe were not merely different but racially inferior, efforts to block their entry would be strengthened.2
Among the best known of the American racists, Madison Grant described Eastern European Jews in terms that rendered them subhuman: “dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest.” Worse yet, in his view, the admission of such racial inferiors would irrevocably weaken “the stock of the nation,” for there was no possibility that the weaknesses and vices they brought would be diluted through intermarriage. Instead, a leveling down would occur, with the resulting racial mixture “reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type.” Thus, intermarriage between whites and blacks would always produce black offspring. As far as Jews were concerned, the result would be the same: “The cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”3
The confluence of intellectually respectable racial theories with the drive for immigration restrictions ultimately made itself felt in British-Israel circles. The leading American Anglo-Israelite of the period, C. A. L. Totten, began in the early 1890s by following the position laid out by his friend and mentor, Edward Hine. Thus the 1891 edition of his treatise Our Race is free of anti-
Semitic references and, indeed, generally avoids any extensive comments on Jews. By 1897, however, Totten felt it necessary to write expansively on the subject. He did so, however, with an ambiguity that suggests something of the conflicting forces that played upon the British-Israel movement. On the one hand, he took for granted the necessity of Jewish restoration to Palestine, in fulfillment of the divine mandate for the unification of Israel. He took comfort in the travails of Ottoman Turkey as evidence that the time of restoration was near: “All things portend the ending of an age.” Thus far, he reflected both the philo-Semitism of Hine and the millennial expectations widespread in Protestant circles as the century approached its end. However, Totten appended to this conventional view a series of seemingly gratuitous remarks on Jews less reflective of British-Israelism per se than of anti-Semitic currents in the larger society.
Totten, like many others at the time, imputed to Jews enormous power and wealth—indeed, so much so that he suggested God’s plan, as revealed in British-Israelism, would be best advanced by a tripartite “racial alliance” of England, America, and “the Kingdom of Judah.” The advantage of such an arrangement for the Jews was obvious, for it would give them essential political backing for a return to Palestine. But, in Totten’s view, there was great future benefit for England and America as well, for once the return was effected, the Palestinian Jews “will necessarily develop into a strong, if not the strongest Nation upon earth; and they are by blood, by letter, and by inheritance the natural allies of the Anglo-Saxon Race. A word to the wise is sufficient.” The Jews, in other words, would shortly become a world power to be reckoned with, and those who had earned their gratitude would be rewarded. This conception was echoed a quarter-century later in William J. Cameron’s Dearborn Independent, in an article which predates “The International Jew” series. The Independent suggested that when the Jews did return to Palestine, they might establish a monarchy there, with a Rothschild as king; the Rothschilds might perhaps even “make Palestine the center of their banking operations.” Totten, and the Independent after him, tapped into the widespread popular notion of hidden Jewish power, particularly commercial and financial, which might be used for good but, then again, might not. The conspiratorialism The Protocols lay only a short step beyond.4
In addition to his speculations on Jewish power in Palestine, Totten had also absorbed the contemporary penchant for racial analysis. Disclaiming personal prejudice (“Personally, I like Jews”), he went on to cast a balance sheet of racial virtues and vices. On the one hand, they are thrifty, industrious, and philanthropic. But on the other hand, they are so “clever in the trade of money-making” that “collectively they are a serious danger.” His fear was that while the Christian rich were nationals of their respective countries first and foremost, and thus incapable of uniting in a common enterprise, Jews, in Totten’s opinion, “are Jews first, and Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russian, afterwards.” They have used their wealth, he said, to buy newspapers in order to mold public opinion and thus “render all policies subservient to the Jewish supremacy.” The outcome he foresaw was “Jewish conquest of the world.” Thus, even as Totten denied all prejudice, he prefigured the conspiracy theory of The Protocols and the Dearborn Independent. While there is no evidence to suggest that Cameron was aware of his writing, Cameron’s own British-Israelism makes this likely, and in any case, this side of Totten surely anticipates the linkage of conspiratorialism and British-Israelism that Cameron worked so assiduously to effect.5
Having cast up his balance sheet, Totten was uncertain as to the consequences. He certainly advocated no systematic persecution or legal disabilities. As long as Jews obeyed the law, he wrote, they should ply their trades and put forward their opinions in the same way as their Gentile compatriots. “No one would dream of persecuting them.” But he clearly regarded them as “a real and serious danger” and had no short-term answer to his imagined concentration of Jewish power. In the longer term, however, he saw in British-Israelism a solution to what was stereotypically called “the Jewish problem,” for once the Jews were restored to Palestine, “under the protectorate of England and America,” all problems about the place of Jews in Western societies would be solved. It was a position with curious similarities to that of classical Zionism, which argued that only in a Jewish state could the status of Jews be “normalized.” Totten’s emphasis upon the supervisory power of England and America established them not only as guarantors of a Jewish homeland but as bulwarks against the concentration of Jewish power. In sum, Totten maintained Hine’s emphasis upon the responsibility of the Anglo-Saxon peoples for the return of the Jews to Palestine, and he reiterated Hine’s belief that contemporary Jews were the lineal descendants of the tribe of Judah. However, Totten was clearly touched by the rising anti-Semitism of the Gilded Age, and its preoccupation with the “otherness” of the Jew and his alleged plutocratic power.6
British-Israelism had already significantly reduced the religious claims Jews might make, by transferring the chosenness of Israel to the Anglo-Saxons and reducing Jews to a Judean remnant. Even the popular anti-Semitism that filtered into Totten’s writings was counterbalanced by this residual claim that Jews were a part of All-Israel. Anti-Semitism would not become a major element in British-Israelism until this residual claim was somehow neutralized, so that Jews were not only not-Israel but also not-Judah. In fact, the seeds for such a second stage of religious delegitimization had been present from the very beginning of British-Israelism in the writing of its “founding father,” John Wilson.
John Wilson wished to make the point that the descendants of the lost tribes had retained their identity even though they had been “lost among the heathen.” He did so in part by the kind of spurious linguistic analysis that was to become commonplace among British-Israelites, arguing, for example, that on the basis of similarities of sound, “Many of our most common words and names of familiar objects are almost pure Hebrew.” However, he also sought to reinforce the “racial integrity” of Israel-in-Europe by showing that the Jews were just as “lost” even though they seemed to have a greater degree of intactness. He did so by suggesting that while Jews had stayed for a longer period in Palestine (presuming as he did that Jews were descendants of the kingdom of Judah), they had spent much of that time in intermarriage with proscribed heathen populations: “If one people were cursed above another, it was Edom, of the children of Abraham, and Canaan among the more immediate descendants of Noah; and with both of these ‘the Jews’ have become signally mingled, so as to become one people with them, and inherit the curse of both.” This motif initially was a minor one, since Hine in later years vigorously advanced the view that Jews were Judah, pure and simple. However, particularly in the twentieth century, other British-Israel writers were to incorporate and elaborate upon the hypothesis Wilson had advanced in 1840.7
This process may have begun first in America. It certainly was conspicuously present among key American British-Israelites by the 1930s, and in their British counterparts a decade later. William J. Cameron, in a sermon delivered in a Detroit church in 1934, placed Israel in a continuing struggle with “the Esau race,” the descendants of Jacob’s rival. Those descendants had “amalgamated with the Jews, and began their terrible work of corrupting the Jewish religious from within.” These Esau descendants had become the Edomites and later the Idumeans, from whom the family of Herod had descended. By implication, then, whatever there had been of Judah in the Jews had been corrupted and displaced by the blood of “the Esau race” until the Jews were indissolubly, biologically linked with Jesus’ persecutor. Much the same view was put forward in the same year by Frederick Haberman, a British- Israel writer in St. Petersburg, Florida, in a work that has been republished by both British-Israel and Christian Identity organizations up to the present day. Haberman acknowledged that Jews had originally been descendants of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. However, they had intermarried so extensively with other peoples that their very appearance had changed: “During their stay in Palestine they intermarried with the masters of Palestine, the Edomites, the Idumeans, and Syrians, and took on the dark complexion and features of these people. Generally, the Israelites were tall and fair, the cream of the Aryan race.” Four years later, in 1938, George R. Riffert took a slightly different but related tack. The “pure Jews are very few in number.” As to the others, their “originally fine, Israelitish countenance” has been marred by “continuous intermarriage with the Hittites and Canaanites.” Riffert asks why Jesus and the disciples in religious paintings do not “look like a Jew.” It never seems to have occurred to him that these images reflected local religious and artistic conventions rather than portraits made from life. Jews look different, he believed, because God has punished them for race mixing.8
Not surprisingly, Howard Rand, the editor of Destiny, in which both the Cameron and Riffert articles appeared, accepted the intermarriage theory, except that he concentrated on the Hittites rather than on the Edomites or Canaanites. It was Hittite blood that “gave the Jew his dark hair and eyes and the facial characteristics by which he is known and recognized today.” Rand’s emphasis upon Hittite intermarriage was by no means original. It was already present in the racial anthropology that passed as social science well into the interwar period. The influential racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard (1883– 1950), who wrote widely in the popular press during the 1920s, had advanced the same position on allegedly scientific grounds completely divorced from British-Israelism. In a widely cited 1926 article, “The Pedigree of Judah,” he noted a “striking … parallel between the ancient Hittites and a large proportion of the modern Ashkenazim.” “One cannot look at a Hittite sculpture,” he wrote, “without being struck by the ‘Jewishness’ of the faces there depicted.” While Stoddard had no interest in British-Israelism, his racial analysis of Jewish facial features fitted perfectly with that strain of British-Israelism anxious to further diminish the ties between Jews and All-Israel.9
The link with the Edomites, which had originated with John Wilson in 1840, eventually found its way back into mainstream British-Israel writing, and from no less a figure than David Davidson, whose pyramidology dominated the movement in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1944, Davidson concluded, as Americans had earlier, that Jews had “completely absorbed” the Edomites. As a result, “the Jews become racially the medium of expression for the Edomite ideals to which Herod the Great had first given political formulation.” The Jews were thus an irredeemably corrupt hybrid in which heathen vices had overwhelmed any All-Israel virtues. The most systematic exposition of this position was given four years later by the Vancouver Anglo-Israelite, C. F. Parker, in A Short History ofEsau-Edom in Jewry, issued by the British-Israel publishing house in London.10
Parker developed themes already latently present in Cameron, Rand, and Davidson. He spoke, for example, of Esau-Hittites, thus collapsing the distinction between Edomites and Hittites. He also advanced an elaborate argument concerning the consequences of the racial corruption produced by intermarriage. He did so by asserting that there was a division within the Jewish people between a small portion who were “true Judah,” undefiled by racial admixtures, and the larger group of “Idumean-Hittites, masquerading as the true seed of Abraham and seeking to expel the direct descendants of Jacob.” As Parker saw it, there was no great difficulty in distinguishing the two. Authentic Jews were pious and placed their fate in God’s hands. Esau’s descendants had rejected traditional Judaism in favor of atheism, embraced violence and revolution, and favored Zionism. More concretely, the authentic Jews are the Sephardim, while the Esau-Hittites are the Ashkenazim, concentrated historically in Eastern and Central Europe and now in America. The influence of Parker’s formulation lay in its explicit fusion of religious categories (Jacob-Esau, Israel-Edom) with “racial” categories (Ashkenazim-Sephardim), building upon the older hostility to Eastern European Jews as a racially unassimil-able group. This aversion, particularly strong in countries to which large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews had emigrated, Parker now traced to the primordial struggle between the children of Jacob and the children of Esau. In so doing, he reinforced the view that Jews, rather than constituting a homogeneous group, were divided into those who were authentic and worthy and those who were counterfeit and corrupt. Parker’s views were to resonate subsequently in Christian Identity. Thus Conrad Gaard, writing about 1960, cited Parker approvingly in his discussion of “pseudo-Jews.”11
This line of development, emphasizing intermarriage with heathen peoples, contained a curious irony, for traditionally British-Israel had understood “Edom” in quite different terms, having nothing to do with Jews. The Jews were not Edom. Esau’s descendants were the Turks. M. M. Eshelipan, for example, took it for granted in his discussion of the politics of the Ottoman Empire in 1887: “Edom now owns and controls the holy mountain—Jerusalem—and rejoices over the house of Judah, not the house of Israel; but the time will come when ‘the house of Jacob shall be a fire, and the house of Joseph (Israel) a flame, and the house of Esau (the Turks) for stubble/ All this because Israel and Judah must possess the land, hence the Turks must be removed, not by Russia but by Israel.” This remained the position, and, if anything, it was strengthened, after Britain’s defeat of Turkey in World War I. The identification of Edom with the Turks was so strong, in fact, that when Parker came to write his book in the late 1940s he found it necessary to begin with a special justification, noting that attempts to identify “the seed of Esau with modern Jewry have caused a certain amount of perplexity to those who have been accustomed to regard the Turk as the progeny of Jacob’s twin brother.” In defense of his revisionist view, he insisted that the traditional position was without historical evidence, while he was prepared to offer “an abundance of evidence” that the Jews, not the Turks, were the real latter-day Edomites.12
The significance of the new identification lay not only in the damage it did to Jewish authenticity, by suggesting that most Jews descended from racially inferior interlopers, but also in the ease with which the old religious language lent itself to new political implications. “Edom” meant “red.” In addition, some medieval biblical interpreters had argued that the Jews were the offspring of Esau, whereas the Christians stemmed from Jacob. This tradition may account for (or, alternatively, be the by-product of) legends that the lost tribes were “red Jews” who would one day pour into Europe through a pass in the Caucasus Mountains. The color designation of Edom, and its occasional legendary association with Jews, took on new and sinister political overtones in the twentieth century, for it became the basis for assertions that there was a natural affinity between Jews and Red politics. Parker had hinted as much when he claimed that most Russian communist revolutionaries were descendants of Esau-Edom. Howard Rand claimed it was “renegade Jews” who had allowed the Bolsheviks to achieve victory. Christian Identity writers later made the connection in much more explicit terms, as in this comment by a follower of Wesley Swift: “We are all aware that Red and Edom are interrelated, and that the Amalek seed line, the Canaanite seed line, merging with the Edomite seed line, is the house of Red Jewry, Communism today.” In similar fashion, the Identity minister Karl Schott anticipates the day when God “moves… against the armies of Communism and the Edomites.” Thus the symbolism of medieval legend, refracted through British-Israel exegesis, identifies the Edomites not only with the Jews rather than with Turks, but makes them a fount of political radicalism whose source lies in the interracial couplings of the ancient Near East13
As this use of the Edom-equals-Jews-equals-communists equation suggests, the British-Israel argument on the racial origins of Jews has been fully incorporated into the Christian Identity belief system. Bertrand Comparet fastened upon Judah’s marriage to a Canaanite woman, whose son, Shelah, fathered a “half-breed, mongrel line,” to which were added descendants of Hittites, Amorites, and Edomites. As a result, according to Comparet, no Jews “were any part of any tribe of Israel.” Even the remnant of undefiled Judah descendants has been eliminated. In Comparefs version, the Jews had never been Israelites. Instead, they were the indigenous Canaanites who were in the land when the Israelites entered it, and with whom the latter intermarried. When the tribe of Judah went into Babylonian exile, the Edomites, who had themselves intermarried with Canaanites, “moved westward into the vacant lands of Judah.” Thus, a mixture of Canaanites and Edomites took the geographical and historic place of the tribe of Judah under the name of “Jews.” Not surprisingly, a similar position was adopted by the most prominent of American anti-Semites, Gerald L. K. Smith, who while not himself an Identity figure, was affiliated (as we have seen) with many important Identity preachers.14
William Potter Gale was among the few Christian Identity figures to attempt a systematic statement of doctrine, in his 1963 pamphlet, “The Faith of Our Fathers.” His position closely resembled Comparefs. Those Gale called “Yehudi” also spring from Shelah, “a mongrelized son of Judah.” Shelah’s descendants are then twice “mongrelized” by becoming “joined with the mongrelized descendents of Esau who had taken Canaanite wives in the days of Jacob and all were called ‘Yehudi.’” Once this amalgamation is effected, the Shelahites become Edomites and bear the curses associated successively with Cain, putative ancestor of the Canaanites, as well as with Esau and Judah. As we shall see in the next chapter, the link with Cain and the Canaanites eventually becomes even more theologically significant than the stigma associated with Esau and Edom.15
By the 1970s, Identity writers vie in the number and depravity of heathen peoples with which they link the Jews. For one the Jews are “Canaanites/ Essauites” and Edom a fusion of “Canaanites” and Amalekites. The result is “a perpetual hatred of us as we of them … [that] goes all the way back through Esau/Amalekites-Esau/Canaanites back to Cain.” For another, Sheldon Emry, Esau intermarried with Canaanites, and his descendants “infiltrated true Israel to become its rulers and religious leaders (scribes and Pharisees) in Jerusalem.” Jarah Crawford, one of Identity’s more systematic biblical ex-egetes, incorporates nineteenth-century attitudes toward race mixing. Believing Jews to be a “half-breed, race-mixed polluted people … the products of fornication,” he concludes that as a result they are necessarily inferior, for “race-mixing always and forever produces an inferior being.” Dan Gayman, of the Church of Israel, writes of an amalgamation of the “apostate branches of the Abrahamic family”—a conglomeration of cursed peoples, “all claiming descent from Abraham, and yet none of them being legitimate seed,” since all were involved in forbidden marriages. Mark Thomas, the Pennsylvania state chaplain of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, sees racial intermarriage as an apparently uncontrollable predilection of Esau’s descendants, who allegedly “followed his evil example.” When Esau’s son’s concubine gives birth to Amalek, she begins yet another line of Israel’s enemies. From “Amalek,” Thomas derives the epithet “kike,” which he tells his readers is merely a contraction of Amalek and “refers to the true family tree of the ‘Jew.’”16
One of the more systematic efforts to untangle these biblically derived genealogies appeared in a chart of descent published in Calling Our Nation, the publication of the Aryan Nations and Church of Jesus Christ Christian in Hayden Lake, Idaho. In its derivation, the descendants of Cain and Ham produce the Hittites, with whom Esau intermarries, producing the Edomites. They in turn intermarry with “part of Judah” (presumably the descendants of Shelah) to become the Idumeans, who include “mixed blood (so-called Jews).” Interestingly, this Aryan Nations rendering retains the British-Israel concept of a “pure bloodline” of Judahites, who in time produce not only Jesus but a category labeled “Sephardic Orthodox true Judahite,” with no indication any longer that “Sephardic” has anything whatever to do with Jews. Jews have been so completely redefined as to exist within this genealogical system merely as a synonym for the defiled and corrupted.17
In short, the link with Edom, originating in John Wilson’s original formulation of the British-Israel position and developed with special force in the 1940s, became the foundation on which was erected an increasingly complex and convoluted line of Jewish descent, ever more heavily freighted with sinister connotations. As the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples represented all that was pure, so Jews became little more than a receptacle for every source of evil and impurity in the biblical narrative. What had turned the once philo-Semitic tendencies of British-Israelism in so pernicious a direction?
In large measure, the association of Jews with biblical impurity is tied to British-Israel’s rising hostility to Zionism. British-Israelism, particularly under the impress of Edward Hine, took a traditionally paternalistic view of Jewish national aspirations. For M. M. Eshelman, as for others in the movement, the return to Zion was testimony to the nearness of the final days. Support for Jewish settlement in Palestine was predicated on Britain’s continued role, first as its facilitator and then as its guarantor. Events appeared to confirm this view, particularly with General Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem from the Turks (the traditional Edom) in 1917. Britain was required not simply as a guarantor, however, but as a coparticipant, for since it, along with America, constituted the key elements of Israel, Ephraim and Manasseh, Britain must be in Palestine, too. Jews were at best only Judah, not Israel, and had not prophecy promised a comprehensive regathering? Thus did the argument go, the result of which was a highly qualified support for Zionism. Settlement was permissible and even necessary for the fulfillment of the divine plan, but sovereignty was not. Indeed, the very concept of a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine was anathema, for it could exist only if Britain retreated or was expelled, and if that occurred, Palestine would be left with Judah but without Israel. Hence, any movement toward a Jewish state at Britain’s expense had to be resisted at all costs.18
This anti-Zionist strain was suppressed through most of the Second World War, due in part to the inability of the Zionist movement to muster significant international support up to this point. It was also due to the view, widespread in British-Israel circles, that the war was about to produce the climactic time of which millenarian prophecies spoke, the events foretold in Revelation of a great battle at Armageddon, of the descent of Christ in glory, and the inauguration of the millennial age. Since these events were considered imminent, and necessarily had to occur in Palestine, Jewish political goals appeared of little moment.
The apocalyptic scenario for World War II was advanced in astonishing concreteness, due perhaps to the large number of retired military officers in the movement. As has already been mentioned, Colonel MacKendrick went so far as to write a letter on October 25, 1940, to Lieutenant General A. G. McNaughton, the commander of Canadian troops in Britain, alerting him to the shape the war was about to take. Germany would attempt the capture of the Iranian and Iraqi oil fields, along with the pipeline to Haifa, and attack the British fleet in the Mediterranean. Mussolini, in the meantime, would initially conquer Egypt and Palestine, but would be defeated and slain in Palestine, as the combined armies of Russia, Turkey, Persia, and Germany gathered against Jerusalem. But the king of England would meet the challenge by calling a National Day of Prayer, and supernatural forces would defeat the unholy coalition “in the Great Day of Almighty God by the Omnipotent power of our Lord and we will be saved to carry on into the NEW ERA as decreed in the Holy Writ.” There is no indication of General McNaughton’s response to this curious religiomilitary analysis, but MacKendrick’s approach was by no means unique.19
MacKendrick prepared a modified and much elaborated version for public consumption the same year, an enterprise for which he consulted his friend William J. Cameron (see chapter 4). Although he and Cameron apparently disagreed about the reference to Jews in MacKendrick’s original manuscript, the discussion of Jews was scant in the published version. He clearly regarded Jewish claims to Palestine as scarcely worth discussing on the eve of Armageddon, and limited himself to observing that Jewish claims “will not stand in the overturning that we shall witness in Palestine.” Since the “consummation of prophecy” was to occur within the coming year, the politics of Zionism were deemed distinctly peripheral.20
Although neither 1943 nor 1944 brought the prophetic fulfillment MacKendrick expected, his analysis remained influential, for it reappeared in at least two other versions from different hands in 1944. A strikingly similar analysis, with comparable emphasis upon the military strategies the belligerents would employ, came from Howard Rand in the fall of 1944. Rand, however, was now aware of the fact that World War II was likely to end without the climactic events in the Middle East that MacKendrick had anticipated, and he therefore extended the millenarian script to encompass a postwar struggle with the Soviet Union: “The first phase of World War II will end with the capitulation of Germany and the second phase will follow immediately with the Sovietization of Europe and the formation of a world confederacy of the nations who are to join in the great combination that will move against the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples in the bid for world domination and power.” Here, too, the imminence of world-shaking events left little room for a consideration of Jewish claims to Palestine.21
But another work, also published in 1944, suggested that as British-Israelites looked past the war, or toward its extension following the defeat of Germany, Zionism would loom larger in their awareness. Canadian British-Israelites in Vancouver issued the pseudonymously authored apocalyptic novel When?: A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future, by “Ben Judah,” which set the coming military conflict in Palestine in a fictional framework. The protagonist, one Brian Benjamin, a Sephardic Jew who has converted to Christianity, visits Palestine on an obscure, presumably British, intelligence mission, arriving in time to witness the British retreat from Jerusalem, the city’s capture by the forces of Gog, and the storms, earthquakes, and sundry other interventions that prevent Gog’s final triumph. After the heaving earth, sulphurous fire, and hailstones save the British army, Christ returns and establishes the millennial kingdom. Unlike MacKendrick’s and Rand’s earlier narratives, however, the When? author is careful to note that Gog’s capture of Jerusalem was significantly aided by collusion with Zionists. Indeed, the Zionist fifth column is none other than the inauthentic Jews who are the descendants of the interracial marriages in ancient times. One of Brian Benjamin’s informants is happy to enlighten him about these racial differences. There are, he says, “two races of so-called Jews, the Sephardim, or true Semitic Jews of Israel blood, and the Ashkenazim … who are not Semitics, nor are they Jews except by religion…. There was great animosity between the real Semitic Jews and the greater part of the Zionists [who] were usurpers of Gentile blood.”22
With the growth of the Zionist movement and the realization that World War II was not to bring the fulfillment of prophecies, the belief grew that not only were there distinct “races” of Jews, one authentic and the other inauthentic, but that the latter provided the wellsprings of Zionism. For if God had intended that Palestine go to Israel (the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples) as well as to Judah, how could “authentic” Jews pursue a contrary course?
One of the earliest suggestions of Zionism’s illegitimacy had appeared in the Dearborn Independent, in 1921, with the suggestion that Zionists were pawns of Bolshevism. The Independent foresaw a rebellion of Palestinian Jews against the British, aided by their Russian kinsman, but to no avail, for Great Britain “and perhaps the United States will defend the old pure vision of a Jerusalem redeemed.” Although Howard Rand had omitted Zionism from his military analysis of the coming Battle of Armageddon, he left no doubt as to his views on the illegitimacy of Zionism: “God has overruled the endeavor to give to Jewry what does not belong to them through an increasingly Arab opposition to Jewish demands. Jewry cannot nor will they ever be able to administer the affairs of Palestine. Their nationhood ended in 70 A.D. and will not again be restored.” And, like “Ben Judah,” Rand suggested that the Zionists might work hand-in-glove with the forces of Gog. This army of evil would shortly “march toward Palestine.” England’s refusal to accept Zionist claims would trigger the advance of Gog’s forces on Palestine, thus setting the stage for the final act of history.23
C. F. Parker, writing in 1948, the year of the creation of the state of Israel, synthesized the growing antipathy to Zionism with his belief in “two races of Jews.” The Zionists were in his view almost all Ashkenazim, and therefore “Esau-Edomites.” While the Sephardim were presumed to be pious, apolitical, and reliant only upon God’s mercies, the Ashkenazic Zionists used the financial and political influence of European and American Jewish communities to foster their political program for statehood. Parker regarded the result as both odious and blasphemous:
The newly declared Jewish State of “Israel” is as ersatz and barren as its predecessor, the Herodian-Jewish nation, for it still rejects Jesus Christ. It is a pretender. Palestinian Jewry is a Communist and Atheist-ridden monstrosity whose only ambition is not to serve the world but to rule it. … The Jews have seized the Holy Land from the rightful owners—Israel-Britain, who has blindly and stupidly, and yet for a divine purposes-permitted her heritage to pass to them.
The Herodians, we will remember, were themselves regarded as the tainted offspring of forbidden liaisons, and so the new state is linked with the “racial” violations of an earlier generation.24
The events of 1948 solidified Howard Rand’s resolve as well. Two months after the proclamation of the Jewish state, he branded it the work of “renegade Jews,” not “true Israelitish Jews.” These “renegades” were the same impostors who thirty years earlier “were instrumental in taking over Russia.” A year later, Rand was even more explicit in his identification of Zionism with cosmic evil. The Zionists were part of “a Great Conspiracy,” a “program of evil,” whose fundamental tactic was the deception practiced by its members. These false Jews had successfully deceived Christians so that Jews rather than Christians would appear to constitute Israel, the better to further their acquisition of world power. Rand went on to characterize Zionists in language reminiscent of The Protocols: “Thoughtful men and women have long recognized the existence of a secret group of would-be world rulers whose activities have been manifested principally through the power of money and financial control. For example, a study of the history of the Nihilists, the Illuminati, the Fabians and the House of Rothschild supplies ample evidence of the existence of such a cabal.” The Zionists were merely the Great Conspiracy’s most recent manifestation.25
The intensity of anti-Zionist sentiment among British-Israel writers contrasted sharply with the very different response to Jewish statehood among other Protestant millenarians. The principal expression of Protestant millennialism—dispensationalism—did what British-Israelites found so unacceptable: it identified prophecies concerning Israel with the history of the Jewish people. Consequently, for those evangelical Protestants within the dispensa-tionalist fold, the creation of the state of Israel was cause for rejoicing, as was the reunification of Jerusalem nineteen years later. Indeed, the resentments of British-Israelites, and of Christian Identity believers later, have been directed not only against Zionists but toward the influential and vocal body of pro-Zionist Christians whose scenario for the millennium is premised upon the reestablishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
The anti-Zionist tenor of British-Israel writing, particularly in the late 1940s, centered upon the assertion that plans for the state had been made and advanced by counterfeit Jews, with no claim to biblical authenticity. They were the offspring of idolators, whose very genes carried the predilection for evil that had existed in their remote ancestors. As we have seen, these “false Jews” were invariably identified as Eastern European and were frequently contrasted with their allegedly authentic and pious Sephardic coreligionists. We have also seen that hostility toward Russian and Polish Jews was by no means unique to British-Israelism. It pervaded the native-born elites of countries that experienced large-scale Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. Hence, hostility to Ashkenazic Jews was shared by a wide range of individuals for a variety of motives, some theological (in the case of British-Israelites), but some on the grounds that this Jewish in-migration was unassimilable, disease-ridden, harbored political radicalism, and fostered unethical business practices. Because so many outside British-Israelism exhibited bias against the Eastern Europeans, elements of this larger hostility found their way into British-Israelism.
Foremost among these external anti-Semitic motifs brought into British-Israelism was the charge that Eastern European Jews were in fact not Europeans at all but were “Asiatics.” The specific form this took was the accusation that Jews from the czar’s empire were descendants of the Khazars, a people that had once lived near the shores of the Black Sea, and whose leadership stratum and an unknown portion of its populace had converted to Judaism in the seventh century. The Khazar theory never figured as a major component of anti-Semitism. Indeed, it receives only scant attention in Léon Poliakov s monumental history of the subject. However, it came to exercise a particular attraction for advocates of immigration restriction in America. Since they already had a well-developed position on the exclusion of “Orientals,” particularly the Chinese, the suggestion that Jews were Asiatics rather than Europeans made it possible to include them within an existing category of inadmissible foreigners. Hence in the 1920s when immigration restrictionism reached a peak, the Khazar theory enjoyed a vogue in America, although it had in fact existed for several decades before that.26
The earliest suggestion that Khazar ancestry played a significant role in determining the composition of Ashkenazic Jewry appears to have been in a lecture given by Ernest Renan, “Judaism as Race and as Religion,” on January 27, 1883. Although the conversion of the Khazar ruling group was well known, Renan seems to have been the first to suggest that Khazar converts may have been numerous enough to constitute a major proportion of Eastern European Jewry. Renan’s suggestion was consistent with his long-standing belief that a racial distinction separated Jews from Aryans. There was, however, no immediate reason for such a view to exercise an attraction for British-Israelites, except insofar as they might for their own reasons have harbored an antipathy toward Ashkenazic Jews. There was nothing in the Khazar theory per se that commended it to British-Israelites, for—ironically—legend had for generations associated the Black Sea Khazars with the ten lost tribes of Israel.27
This association seems to have had its origin in the complex of medieval legends concerning Alexander’s Gate, a barrier Alexander the Great was alleged to have had constructed in one of the mountain passes of the Caucasus, for the purpose of shutting out from the civilized world barbarian masses until such time as the wars of Gog and Magog in the Last Days should require their presence. Those behind the gate were sometimes Scythians, sometimes Turks, sometimes the lost tribes, and sometimes Khazars. Although tales of the gate faded out by the Renaissance, it is possible that since both the Khazars and the lost Israelites were candidates for enclosure behind it, their names were first linked and then fused. What is not speculative is that John Wilson, the founder of British-Israelism, in his effort to track down stray descendants of the lost tribes, did in fact link them quite explicitly with the Khazars, who sprang from Israel and “who are of the same race with the Anglo-Saxons.” Having been brought so explicitly within both the Israel and Anglo-Saxon folds by Wilson, how did the Khazars become linked a century later to Esau-Edom, Bolshevism, and the Zionist conspiracy?28
To get some sense of the manner in which the Khazars came to function as an anti-Semitic symbol, it is instructive to look at the use made of them by perhaps the most widely read American racialist of the interwar period, Loth-rop Stoddard. Even more than Madison Grant, Stoddard spread a racialist gospel to a mass audience, not only through nearly two dozen books but through numerous articles in the popular press. Stoddard brought impeccable credentials to the enterprise. Born of an old New England family, he received a law degree and a doctorate from Harvard. While Stoddard was a prolific author, the work that reverberated longest was his 1926 magazine article, “The Pedigree of Judah.” The editors of the Forum, where it appeared, disclaimed any wish to sow prejudice or hatred: “We believe that a vast majority of our readers realize that only good has come from the fearless airing of honest differences of opinion.” In “seeking out the underlying cause of the symptoms [of] the Jewish question,” they commended Stoddard’s approach as “broad and scientific.” Stoddard too claimed only the desires of a scientist for sure and objective knowledge: “Surely no factor is more vital than that of Jewry’s racial make-up. Modern science teaches us the basic importance of race.” Yet Stoddard’s analysis appeared strangely similar to those made by persons of no particular scientific pretensions.29
Stoddard too spoke in terms of two races of Jews, and in nearly the same way as theologically inclined British-Israelites, with whom he had no discernible links. There were the “aloof and “aristocratic” Sephardic Jews, who were Semites. But there were also the Ashkenazic Jews, whose “coarse features… reveal [ed] a mixture of diverse bloods.” Their “Jewish nose” had been acquired through intermarriage with the ancient Hittites. The Sephardic Jews had entered the Mediterranean world, “absorbing much Mediterranean blood.” But their eastern brethren had wandered into southern Russia, where they met up with and blended into the Khazars. The latter Stoddard regarded as a combination of Turkish and Mongoloid strains from the fastnesses of Asia. “The result was a population prevailingly round-headed and thick-set, but with two outstanding facial types: the full-faced, hook-nosed Armenoid; and the flat-faced, squat- or pug-nosed Mongoloid.” The physical differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews were merely the external sign of “profound differences… in mentality and temperament.” As far as the presence of “genuine Hebrew blood” was concerned, it was “very small” among the Se-phardim, “while among the Ashkenazim it must be infinitesimal.” To his analysis, Stoddard appended a series of Jewish portraits with predictably clinical explanatory notes.30
Stoddard was, of course, operating from a set of underlying ideas that did not derive from British-Israelism at all. Rather, they reflected nineteenth- and early twentieth-century concepts of race, in which small variations in facial features as well as presumed accompanying character traits were deemed to pass from generation to generation, subject only to the corrupting effects of marriage with members of other groups, the result of which would lower the superior stock without raising the inferior partners. Racial inequality had become accepted scientific opinion by the mid-1800s, and on this foundation were erected increasingly elaborate racial typologies, which attempted to make increasingly fine distinctions among racial groups, a tendency both reflected and extended by Stoddard.31
Although Stoddard was in fact an atheist, his approach to Jewish origins was profoundly congenial to British-Israel thought. British-Israelites were prone toward sympathy with racial anthropology because it shared an important characteristic with their religious views, namely, the belief that important human traits were heritable. To be sure, British-Israelites were not completely deterministic. They still believed, for example, that the acceptance of Christ was essential for salvation. But the dividing line between themselves and other Christians lay in their insistence that a special role in facilitating salvation in the form of both rewards and obligations had been given to a group defined in terms of biological ancestry. Unlike other Christians, who spoke in terms of a “New Israel” defined by belief rather than by blood, British-Israelites insisted that blood mattered in the divine scheme. Therefore “pedigree” (to use Stoddard’s own term) was religiously significant. Had not John Wilson himself cast doubt upon the “pedigree of Judah” when he raised the specter of intermarriage with the heathen? Stoddard’s supposedly scientific analysis of bloodlines, with its intimations of moral as well as physical variation, could not help but strike a responsive chord. As has already been shown, British-Israelites had begun by the 1920s to return to and elaborate Wilson’s ideas of Edomite and Canaanite connections with the Jews. The suggestions by Stoddard and others that Jews’ share of Semitic ancestry might have been further debased by a Khazar connection did not seem implausible to those already predisposed to pay attention to biological antecedents.
The Khazar theory therefore was in no sense peculiar to British-Israelism but was in fact imported from a larger universe of fashionable racial discourse. It did, however, find a particularly accepting audience in British-Israel circles. The Dearborn Independent under William J. Cameron was one such venue. As early as 1923—well before Stoddard’s article—he had observed that Khazar ancestry meant that at least as far as Ashkenazim were concerned, “this indiscriminate mass known as Jews are not the Jews of old, nor even their remote descendants.” Paul Tyner, who contributed an article on the British-Israel movement to Cameron in 1925, included lengthy extracts of an interview he had had in London with one of British-Israelisn’s most prominent figures, Reverend William Pascoe Goard. Goard assured him that the Zionists lacked a valid claim to Palestine, since the Jews, far from being exiles from the land, were in large measure offspring of Khazar proselytes. In the National Message, organ of the British-Israel World Federation, Reverend Frank Hancock, an early leader of the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, left little room for misunderstanding when he assured readers that “we hasten to endorse the writings of Lothrop Stoddard, Geno Sperenza, Madison Grant and others, because the racial question touches all others.” By the mid-1950s, the Khazar connection, along with the racial anthropology that distinguished between “long-headed” Sephardim and “round-headed” Ashkenazim, was accepted seemingly as a matter of course.32
By the 1940s, with the fuller development of the Esau-Edom thesis and more intensely anti-Zionist sentiments, the Khazar theory acquired a decidedly sharper edge. The Canadian When? author disposed of Eastern European Jews as “a minor Asiatic mongrel breed, with a strong admixture of Turko-Mongol blood.” In like manner, C. F. Parker regarded Khazar ancestry as strengthening sinister tendencies already present through the Esau-Edomites. Howard Rand noted that not only did mixture with a “non-Semitic, Turko-Finn, Mongolian tribal people” deprive Jews of any claim to Palestine; it also guaranteed, to Rand’s evident relief, “the non-Jewish lineage of our Lord.”33
The Khazar theory had arisen outside of British-Israelism to begin with. While British-Israelism proved to be a particularly hospitable home for it, it was not the only place where the theory came to rest. It continued to lead a more or less separate life in right-wing circles, at least to the extent that these were sympathetic to anti-Semitic arguments. This connection with political extremism served as a reinforcing factor later on, with the full development of Christian Identity, for many Identity believers were well placed to take “Khazarism” from two sources: the religious literature that issued from British-Israelism and the political literature that came from more secular right-wing sources.
Khazar ancestry of the Jews assumed particular prominence in two books widely read on the extreme right, John Beaty’s Iron Curtain over America (1951) and Wilmot Robertson’s Dispossessed Majority (1972). Beaty exhibited a particularly obsessional concern with the roots of Russian Jewry. Like Lothrop Stoddard before him, Beaty brought academic credentials to his work, which gave it the appearance of objective research. After earning a doctorate in English at Columbia, he joined the faculty of Southern Methodist University, where he eventually became chair of the English Department. During World War II he was chief of the Historical Section of the War Department General Staff. The ideas in Iron Curtain over America circulated widely not only in the circles around Gerald L. K. Smith but in those linked to Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby. The book was therefore exceptionally well placed to reach the emerging Christian Identity right.34
Beaty devoted an entire chapter of the book to Russia and Khazars, although in fact, like earlier writers, he relied upon such outdated sources as Heinrich Graetz’s late nineteenth-century history of the Jews. In Beaty’s version of the story, the conversion of the Khazars had allowed “the imported rabbis and their successors … complete control of the political, social, and religious thought of [the] people.” The reforms of Czar Alexander II, misguided in Beaty’s view, gave the “Judaized Khazars” the ability to infiltrate and corrupt Russia as a whole. They did so with four aims in mind: the development of communism, the fomenting of revolution, the growth of Zionism, and the transfer of their numbers to America. Hence, he argued, they were able not only to seize control of Russia but to provide their conspiracy with an American base as a minority “obsessed with its own objectives which are not those of Western Christian civilization.” Beaty did not employ the religious language familiar in British-Israel tracts; there was no suggestion, for example, of a tie between Khazars and Edomites. But Beaty, by giving currency to the Khazar theory on the extreme right, provided a familiar reference point for Christian Identity in the future. The more prevalent the Khazar theory, the less exotic were religious positions based upon the contaminated racial stock of Jews. Indeed, Christian Identity could be seen as merely pushing the point of racial intermarriage further back in history. Instead of occurring only with the Khazar episode of the seventh century, the conversion of the Khazars could be placed in a framework of Jewish intermarriage extending into the biblical period.35
By the time Wilmot Robertson’s Dispossessed Majority appeared in 1972, Christian Identity was well established. Without adopting an Identity position, and purporting merely to correct distortions in traditional history, Robertson repeated virtually unchanged the view of the Khazars presented almost half a century earlier by Stoddard. He too distinguished between a race of “olive-skinned, long-headed Sephardim” and round-headed Eastern European “Armenoid Khazars.” Like Stoddard, Robertson also concluded that Jews were mistaken in believing they were descended from the biblical Hebrews. Robertson’s book had a particularly strong influence on David Duke. Indeed, Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan also subsequently reprinted Stoddard’s 1926 article in its entirety. Although Duke offered the disclaimer that neither he nor the Klan agreed completely with Stoddard, the article was being republished as “a landmark in bringing an understanding of Jews to non-Jews.” Duke has been careful never to identify himself with Identity or any other religious position. On the other hand, he was lionized in Identity circles and cultivated Identity support, a matter I shall return to in chapter 10.36
In short, by the time Christian Identity took hold as a force on the right in the 1960s and 1970s, the Khazar ancestry of the Jews was a virtual article of faith that emerged simultaneously from two sources: it came by way of British-Israelites anxious to further impugn Jewish racial origins in the wake of the establishment of Israel, for only some innately evil group would oppose God’s will by driving Britain from Palestine. However, as we have seen, Renan’s original suggestion about the Khazars had also found its way into the writings of immigration restrictionists. This association with nativism brought the Khazar theory into prominence among secularists on the right who knew nothing of Anglo-Israelism but were also anxious to find whatever “evidence” was available that might characterize Jews as evildoers. In this connection, the Khazar theory was particularly attractive, since rightists already argued that Jews had been responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution. If they could now also argue that the revolution’s perpetrators were “Turko-Mongol Asiatics” (i.e., barbarians), the revolutionist label would seem all the more plausible. Hence, Christian Identity was able to incorporate the Khazar theory on both religious and political grounds.
Thus, Wesley Swift, the most influential of the first generation of Christian Identity preachers, effortlessly incorporated virtually every element of the racial intermarriage literature, although with some significant modifications. Swift began with the assumption that God’s primal command to Adam’s descendants was the prohibition on racial intermarriage. The Jews, however, were those who systematically violated the commandment and “mongrelized with every people on the face of the earth.” They intermarried with the Hittites and Canaanites “to produce a very cutting type of Jew,” and then with the Khazars to produce “the Mongolian Ashkenazi of our time.” Unlike most earlier writers, however, Swift saw little to distinguish the Sephardim from the Ashkenazim. There was, to be sure, a different skull shape, a matter Stoddard was particularly keen on. But Swift was clearly influenced by the suggestion, made by Stoddard and others, that even the Sephardim carried the blood of Hittites and other infidels. While most early writers who stressed Sephardic-Ashkenazic differences were willing to grant the Sephardim a measure of racial distinction, Swift dismissed them as “thin faced Hittite Jew[s],” in no way preferable to “the round headed Mongolian [Ashkenazic] Jew.” All were equally sullied by crimes of miscegenation, although for some the offenses took place in the remote past, while for others, the descendants of Khazars, they occurred in comparatively recent times. However, like many racialists before him, Swift regarded the taint of distant race mixing as undiluted by time; the recency of the union was insignificant.37
The views of Conrad Gaard were not as widely disseminated as those of his contemporary, Swift, but Gaard too had ties to Gerald L. K. Smith, and Gaard was among the few Identity figures who attempted to present his position in a systematic fashion. Gaard had read and approved of Stoddard’s 1926 article, which he proceeded to place in a theological framework the patrician Stoddard would have found incomprehensible. Those who converted and intermarried among the Khazars were “Babylonian pseudo-Jews” who had never been part of “All-Israel.” They were “Shelahite-Canaanites,” who found the absorption with the Khazars attractive because, in Gaard’s curious version of history, the Khazars could become “one of the largest and strongest nations in Europe.” The Khazar base only whetted their appetite for greater conquests, a plan that Gaard, like Howard Rand, referred to as the “Great Conspiracy,” a cabal “so far-reaching in scope and so audacious in purpose, that it staggers the imagination of men of good will.” Racial mixture not only removes the Jewish people from God’s design, according to Gaard, it creates a mass of unassimilable evildoers for whom each racially forbidden liaison is a step in the direction of world conquest, a theory that fused the obsessive concern for racial purity with The Protocols’s fixation upon a Jewish conspiracy.38
In 1962, Bertrand Comparet added another twist, further integrating the Khazar theory into Identity theology. Comparet claimed that according to the Khazars’ tradition, their ancestors had originally come from the vicinity of Mt. Seir, “which is Edom, the home of the Edomite Jews.” The implication is clear. When the Jews intermarried with the Khazars, they were not becoming further defiled racially; they were merely marrying their own distant kin, since they had themselves lost any Israel connection by virtue of prior fusion with the Edomites. Where Edom had originally been construed as the Turks by British-Israel, and had slowly metamorphosed into the Jews, Edom now became a source of evil from which many streams departed and joined, some Jewish, some Khazar—but, Comparet implies, these are in the end meaningless distinctions. Subsequent Identity writers occasionally accepted Comparers reversal of the Khazar theory, suggesting that Esau-Edomite Jews were the ancestors of the Khazars, rather than the Khazars being forebears of Ashkenazic Jews.39
The more common version—that Khazars were the ancestors of Eastern European Jews—spread throughout the Identity movement, from Richard Girnt Butler’s Aryan Nations to Dan Gayman’s Church of Israel. It appeared on the margin of Identity, in John Harrell’s paramilitary Christian-Patriots Defense League, and in pamphlets by the league’s “minister of defense,” Colonel Gordon “Jack” Mohr, a late convert to Identity. The doctrine’s malleability was evident in the use made of it by Bob Hallstrom, a successor to Sheldon Emry at the America’s Promise Ministry. Hallstrom, in an article originally published by America’s Promise and then republished by Aryan Nations, links the Khazar theory to the medieval ritual-murder libel, according to which Jewish ritual required the blood of Christians. He assures us that such murders continued to be “well documented up until the early 1900s,” and that “to this day young children and adults mysteriously disappear, never to be heard from again.” He implies not only that ritual murder has been verified and continuous, but that its authenticity is rejected because “mainline ‘Christian-dumb’” fails to recognize that Jews are actually “a mixed race of Turko-Finn, Mongolian tribal people from Khazaria.” By implication, such people from beyond the frontiers of civilization would engage in any act, no matter how barbaric.40
The Khazar theory received reinforcement from an unexpected quarter with the publication in 1976 of Arthur Koestler’s Thireenth Tribe. Coming near the close of a life of rare intellectual force, Koestler’s eccentric work, on behalf of the Khazar theory, was bound to attract considerable attention. By unhappy accident, its publication coincided with the rise of Christian Identity. Although unequipped with the specialist background the subject might be thought to require, Koestler nevertheless made an amateur’s serious attempt to investigate and support the theory. In so doing, he reinforced, however inadvertently, many of the positions British-Israelites and others supportive of the Khazar connection had advanced. He concluded that “the Khazar contribution to the genetic make-up of the Jews must be substantial, and in all likelihood dominant,” and therefore that it was scientifically impossible for Jews to have biologically “descended from the biblical tribe.” He implied, as had racial theorists before him, that the “Jewish nose” might well have been acquired from the.” ‘nostrility’… frequent among Caucasian peoples [i.e., the Khazars].” He seems only to have partially understood the implications of his thesis. He does indeed disclaim any desire to impugn the legitimacy of the state of Israel, a status he saw as flowing from United Nations action, not from either an Abrahamic covenant or the genetic profile of contemporary Jews: “The problem of the Khazar infusion a thousand years ago … is irrelevant to modern Israel.” However, Koestler seems to have been either unaware of or oblivious to the use anti-Semites had made of the Khazar theory since its introduction at the turn of the century. Indeed, even in his own lifetime, Christian Identity writers fastened upon his book as the ultimate validation of their own position, for if such a view was advanced by a leading Jewish intellectual and, moreover, advanced as scientifically valid, then it must be more than merely the creation of anti-Semites.41
Identity writers quickly seized the opportunity Koestler had unwittingly provided, selling his book through their mail-order services and putting it to uses its author could scarcely have imagined. Notwithstanding what Koestler himself had written, the New Christian Crusade Church, led by James K. Warner, asserted that “if Koestler (a Jew) is correct, 95% of world Jewry today has Turkish rather than Semitic ancestry. This invalidates their claim to Palestine as a historical home.” This conclusion, although clearly at variance with Koestler’s intentions, was altogether consistent with Identity theology. Koestler accepted the legitimacy of Israel because he saw its claim to sovereignty as assured by the legality of the United Nations partition plan of 1947. Identity, however, had absorbed British-Israelisn’s radically different position, premised upon the significance of putatively “pure” bloodlines and the identification of Israel with the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples. Hence, no showing of legality could override the racial conception of salvation.42
The America’s Promise Ministry regarded The Thirteenth Tribe as sufficiently important to warrant issuing a special newsletter in 1977, reissued a year later, completely devoted to the book. It bore the headline:
FINALLY AVAILABLE TO ALL AMERICANS
ABSOLUTE HISTORICAL PROOF
JEWS ARE NOT ISRAELITES!
“We cannot stress enough,” they wrote, “how absolutely imperative it is for all Christian Americans to consider the startling proof in Arthur Koestler’s book that today’s Jews are not Israelites.” Here, as elsewhere on the Identity right, the implication was that a veil had been pulled away, and what was hidden now stood revealed, although in fact the Khazar episode had long been noted, going back to the medieval Jewish poet-philosopher Judah ha-Levi. America’s Promise took note of the fact that the non-Israelite origin of the Jewish people had much earlier been “Henry Ford’s conclusion,” and that “Ford further proved” that these inauthentic Jews used their Jewish identification as a “cloak” to “take economic and political control of America.” As we have already seen in chapter 3, while this may well have been Ford’s view, the words were those of the British-Israelite William J. Cameron, advanced in the Dearborn Independent, in the volumes that made up The International Jew, and in the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America. Finally, America’s Promise was quick to include what Koestler had omitted, that those who intermarried with the Khazars were “Edomite descendants of Esau,” who would go on after the Khazar period to become communist revolutionaries. In the process, they would “call … [communism’s] followers ‘Reds’ after their Abrahamic ancestor Esau-Edom.”43
Thus by stages the religious authenticity and racial homogeneity of the Jews had been called into question, by British-Israelites, by secular anti-Semites, and by Christian Identity. At first, they came only from the tribe of Judah. Then they were said to have mingled with the offspring of Esau to become Edomites. Along the way, Canaanite and Hittite blood had further compromised them, until whatever was left of Semitic association vanished in the Asiatic gene pool of the Khazars. As this process of delegitimation went forward, the Jews were successively seen as younger brothers who would be protected by the more significant Israel; as weak and sinful harkers after strange peoples; as the carriers of tainted and cursed blood; and finally as impostors masquerading as a biblical people. In this final incarnation, they took on the characteristics compatible with the conspiracy theory of The Protocols of the Elders ofZion. Skilled in the art of concealing their true mixed origins, dissemblers who presented themselves as a people they were not, they now possessed the attributes of guile and clandestinity perfectly suited to participants in a secret organization bent on world conquest. Consequently, religious and political agendas converged. According to the religious beliefs of British-Israelism, Jews were in a subordinate role. Not they but the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples were to have primacy in Palestine. The failure of Jews to acknowledge the “trueIsrael” was bad enough; to repudiate the British role in Palestine was beyond forgiveness or understanding. Only some peculiarly benighted people could so thoroughly seek to subvert God’s plan. It was precisely this concept of the Jews’ commitment to evil and deception that would likewise be required in order to breathe life into the belief that a Jewish conspiracy sought to rule the world.
But this process of dehumanization had one more road to traverse. The acceptance of Jewish “mongrelization” permitted the rejection of Zionism and the adoption of a conspiracy theory of history. But these beliefs, while rendering the Jew less human, did not render him less than human. Jews came increasingly to be viewed as loathsome and dangerous as such labels as “Edomite” and “Khazar” were applied, but they were in the final analysis lowered in the human racial hierarchy rather than removed from it altogether. That final step in the dehumanization process would come.
Loaded as Jews now were with imputations of evil and corruption, it is difficult to believe that they could be further besmirched. Yet Christian Identity took the final step, a step British-Israelism never allowed itself. British-Israelism regarded Jews with increasing disdain and annoyance, as unworthy and duplicitous, but it considered them human beings of some order. Christian Identity ultimately removed them totally from the domain of “humanity,” not, as with blacks, by identifying them with lower animals, but by linking Jews with transcendent, cosmic evil. Christian Identity began to assert with increasing vigor and consistency that Jews were the literal children of the Devil.